Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The Idiot Tracker pointed out that Steve McIntyre is a rent seeker, using Freedom of Information to force others to hand over their hard work

He uses the coercive power of the state to force other people to give him, gratis, the fruits of their labor. He does not produce himself -- he uses the data of others, repackaged and sensationalized, to fuel the hit count of his blog.

So Eli has a suggestion, why don't they bug John Christy and Roy Spencer to release their software? Everyone knows that it is buggy, and could certainly be improved by crowd sourcing. There are some amazing people out there with microwave and programing experience. Eric Swanson, for one, comes to mind. As for Mosher (and McIntyre), in their own words

One can ask all sorts of questions that interest me. And the beautiful thing is that you are using a method that is "accepted" There is no need to re invent the wheel.

perhaps Moshpit will be able to say "For me the approaches of UAH and RSS made sense", after looking at the software. To mix direct quote and paraphrase, he only is

basically interested in creating tools, creating them quickly, getting them into many peoples hands and being able to say with confidence that the code is the same as that used by experts. This is vastly different than independent replication, and I've never pretended that it was replication.

"and requesting the UAH software would be for one purpose and one purpose only. To ascertain whether there was any "value added" by UAH as they had repeatedly claimed. The purpose was not to create an "independent" assessment, although many of us have done that. In short we are likely to find what we expect to find: nothing, no substantive value added by their processing.

Of course some idiots expect that UAH had somehow cooked the data. This was never McIntyre's supposition. This was never my supposition. Quite the opposite. We expected that UAH was overselling the "value" that they added to the data, featherbedding if you like."

"Reducing this uncertainty will require better understanding of the underlying causes of differences between the UAH and RSS TLT retrievals. To achieve this, full public release of the codes used for generating troporspheric temperature retrievals would be highly desirable"

In Congressional testimony, Dr. Christy claimed that the codes UAH scientists have used in generating MSU-based tropospheric temperature retrievals (TLT) were publicly available. This claim was incorrect. The code for producing the TLT record is not publicly available.

Eli hears that RSS will make a public release of their code. RSS is a private company and not subject to FOIA rent seeking, but Christy and Spencer do/did their work at NASA and the University of Alabama Huntsville. In the words of Mosher and McIntyre, that software belongs to us, we paid for it. The Steves need to force Roy and John to hand it over.

Now Eli, Eli is a reasonable Rabett, he only wants all versions of the software, suitable commented so that anybunny can use it straight out of the box, and, oh yes, a well run ftp site for downloading. Perhaps such a thing exists. Pointers please?

20 comments:

what sub-arctic bunny supects it's pretty hard to substract the effect of decreasing water vapor over height (moist vs. dry adiabat) without using groundbased measurements as a supplement for calculations. this is what one could possibly might been able to check.the same.

Have fun with this. In my experience nothing enrages deniers like the suggestion that the be held to the same standards as the scientists they despise. Disclosure, meeting a burden of proof, transparency, conflict of interest -- pick any banner under which the "skeptic" crusade is fought, and gently suggest to them that, as they know themselves to be important contributors to science, "the extended peer community" in Dr Curry's phrase, those same requirements should apply to them and their heroes.

If this is too time consuming and you are not overfond of animals, you could set off a string of firecrackers in a room full of feral cats and get the same reaction.

If the software's owned by UAH and not the individual scientists, then Alabama's public records law might require release. As with a lot of other legal issues, it often comes down to state law, each with their own tweaks.

ho ho ho, those who were given the keys to the castle and the big fat chest of gold have nobody to blame but themselves.

I hope the republicans jam that big fat oil pipeline right down your throats. In fact you should all pay more for home heating and gasoline...but Elis' motto has always been "do as I say, not as I do."

Say why don't one of you USA boys or girls actually put in an FOIA request for the UAH record source code and force the issue to the fore?

Don't worry that you might be refused. In fact extra points if you are refused because that would require some splaining from the Wattbots who typically assume all government funded data should be public and any refusal is a sign of conspiracy.

Then it's time to send in FOIA requests for emails sent between Spencer and Watts and Spencer and McIntyre since 2005. Again refusal would raise awkward questions.

If you don't do this then the skeptics will just carry on with their purer-than-thou act.

Maybe prior to doing this send a blunt email to Spencer demanding the source code in no uncertain terms. According to Wattbot rules he's a public slave and must fulfill any demand for data or source code you make however rudely you do it and however unlikely you are to want to do anything useful with it.

"Say why don't one of you USA boys or girls actually put in an FOIA request for the UAH record source code and force the issue to the fore?"

Maybe because we're not assholes, and we're satisfied with the response of the scientific community to their (rare) published papers, and have some (misguided?) belief that in the end the system will work.

UAH has had their feet held to the fire and have been forced to issue corrections through the normal scientific process, without resort to coercive FOI requests, etc.

Compare that with McI and Moshmisfit ... all the FOI stuff in the world hasn't led to any correction of the CRU science (even though they low-ball warming, well, M&M wouldn't want to correct *that*, would they!?!). They score points - in their own mind - based on rejection of the multiple investigations of wrongdoing on the part of CRU (it's all a conspiracy against truth, I tell ya! those investigations are done by black-helicopter one-world government commie hippy pinko freaks!)

Perhaps the bottom line is ... when science is actually bad, you don't need to stoop to the kind of harassment Moshpit and McI are so proud of (as ineffective as it was, note that it's only the felonious theft of e-mails that makes their efforts relevant, which of course is why they insist it was an honorable whistleblower, not thief, who stole them and put M&M&M back on the map).

How is it assholish? If anything it's the exact opposite of assholish.

It's holding deniers up to the fire, not Spencer. UAH can deny the FOIA request for all I care. What that would do though would challenge deniers to explain how it's OK, to justify it.

Either they act outraged that UAH is hiding the source code, therefore forcing Spencer - one of their own - to finally explain how science works to them, or they don't act outraged and publicly expose their hypocrisy.

Either way it becomes very awkward for deniers after that to smear other scientists for the same thing. So if anything this is the opposite of assholish. This is defending science from unfair attacks.

I actually have nothing against Roy Spencer but he has got close enough to the deniers without managing to correct them on this matter that I don't consider such a move nasty towards Spencer. It's more a "what did you expect?" situation. When you comfy up with people who FOIA and smear other scientists for not living up to fantasy rules the deniers themselves don't have to abide by then what do you expect?

"In every endeavor of science, making your work replicable by others is a basic tenet of proof,” Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and climate change blogger, told FoxNews.com. “If other scientists cannot replicate your work, it brings your work into question.”

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.